Part I: The Invention of The Human
Stiegler's task is to investigate and explain the interrelation between technics and time, firstly by analysing technics in time, that is, by examining theories of technical evolution. This question is important today because technics has become difficult to understand, and it is unclear whether we can predict or orient the evolution of the technical dynamic.
Simondon noted that whereas formerly the human being was the bearer of tools, and thus himself a technical individual, today machines are the tool-bearers, and the human is no longer a technical individual. Heidegger attempted to understand something similar through his analysis of Gestell, his name for the fact that it is now technics, rather than humanity, which commands nature. Today the human is reduced to the assistant of the machine, of technics qua system.
Nevertheless, it is not new that technics is systematic, as Gille tries to think with the concept of programming. Programming as overall planification is the specific feature of modern technics, effecting a rupture in technical evolution. But this rupture then has its own unplanned consequences, threatening general disequilibrium. The question becomes: can the other systems, the cultural systems, today still be programmed, or have they and, in fact, the technical system itself, become chronically unstable? This question is posed by Leroi-Gourhan as that of the relation between the ethnic and the technical.
Stiegler will pursue this question via that of the dynamic of invention, thus the dynamic of the technical system. Gille will contribute the thought of the technical system as a play of stable inter-dependencies. Leroi-Gourhan will add the concept of technical tendency, making it possible to think the uprooting effected by technical evolution. With the thought of technical tendency, it becomes necessary to think the technical system as a process of concretisation. Simondon will then theorise the technical system itself as individual and object, and thereby enable the recognition that technics is not in time but rather constitutes time as such.
Read more about this topic: Technics And Time, 1
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